ABSTRACT
In the years after the Second World War, a pedagogical urgency redirected the preoccupations of architectural discourse as it aimed to expand from a pre-war focus on housing to encompass a wider discussion on social services. Starting with primary and secondary schools as the central briefs of the 1950s, the attention turned to the higher institutions of learning in the 1960s. By 1968, as Joseph Rykwert noted, universities had become the paradigm of their age. With the baby boomer generation approaching college age, and industrialised societies irreversibly moving towards service-based economies, a more educated labour force was required, which in turn made the reform and expansion of higher education systems a paramount priority for Western governments. As a result, an unprecedented number of new universities were built, mostly as detached settlements founded on an ambition to be complete, enclosed, and self-sufficient academic communities – in a word, campuses. They stemmed from a historical trajectory that transformed the original status of the campus as a more indeterminate, open-ended spatial diagram (from the early American colonial colleges to Thomas Jefferson’s project for the University of Virginia) into a closed and self-contained spatial object that aimed to shape a community of peers. Within this development, the campus lost its capacity to confront and critique the territorial logics of its time; instead, it gradually became complicit in the processes of urbanisation, eventually being digested by them. It was exactly this lost confrontational attitude that was reclaimed by the protests of the 1960s. And it was that same reclaimed attitude that triggered the most radical proposals by architects to rethink the idea of the university for the post-industrial mass society. Although not always an explicitly referenced precedent, Cedric Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt, with its reconceptualisation of higher learning as a problem to be dealt with at a territorial scale, set the tone for the type of debate about higher education and university design that developed in Italy in the early 1970s.
